MICHAEL C. MOORE | VIEWPOINT: If every picture tells a story, what do selfies say?

Copyright 2014 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

On vacation last week, I had occasion to do something I don’t really enjoy all that much — have my picture taken.

I’m involved in more picture-taking — more posing, more setting of the delay function, more trying to smile and look happy as the sun sears my eyeballs, more “scrunching up closer” — in that one week than the whole rest of the year. Us on the beach. Us at the restaurant. Us at the rest stop. Us at the tourist trap.

I do like the family photos ... or at least the part of them that shows the rest of the family. I’m not too crazy about looking at myself.

All that picture-taking gave me something to think about on the drive home, including the inevitable rolling slowdowns through Lincoln City and Tigard, Ore., the interminable jam caused by a combination of bridge maintenance and a fender-bender at the Lewis River, and the perpetual momentum-buster that is I-5 through Tacoma. That’s a lot of time to think.

I don’t like getting my picture taken, I thought, so it’s no mystery why I haven’t gotten caught up in the whole “selfie” phenomenon — the practice, often obsessive, of turning the camera on one’s self and posting the result on the social media of your choice, either because you think the rest of the world can’t bear not seeing you, and what you’re doing, right at that moment ... or because you can’t bear it yourself.

I thought about selfies, the whys and wherefores of them, as I moved (sometimes slowly) ever northward.

“The Selfie.” It’s something we invented only recently. We know this because archaeologists can’t find any cave art, amid all the depictions of mastodon hunts and sabretooth tiger attacks, of the close-up grinning faces of cavemen and women, flashing peace signs or making devil horns behind each other’s heads with their fingers.

Cavepeople didn’t have cameras, or the InterWebs. Van Gogh, had he a phone equipped with a camera, might’ve eschewed the famous one-eared self portrait and just posted a selfie, with the caption, “Probably shouldn’t have done that, LOL.”

We have the technology now to obsess upon ourselves as we never have before.

I took a quick random pass through the photo queues on some of my Facebook friends’ pages and was amused, if not astounded, by the percentage of selfies some of them post. “Me, at the Mariners game.” “Me, at the concert.” “Me, with the girl who probably won’t be my girlfriend very much longer, but I’ll always have this selfie.” “Me, with my lunch.” And the most inexplicable of all, “Me, in the bathroom.”

The selfie has been linked, in numerous studies, to narcissism and a number of other psychological disorders. They’re self-indulgent, self-obsessive, self-aggrandizing, self-addictive.

Mostly, they’re time-eaters. For every selfie-ist who snaps one for a legitimate reason (“Hi, Mom! Here’s me in my dorm room!” or “Hello Mr. Director, should I change this hair color before the audition?”), there are hundreds who snap copiously just to pass the minutes, then endless sit and admire their work. Themselves. Narcissus into a two-and-a-half-inch high-def pool.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind seeing photos of you, no matter who took them. I like photos of you, your kids, your pets, your vacations. I can live vicariously through that photo of yourself, with Cinderella’s Castle or a Lahaina sunset or a Broadway theater marquee in the background. For the record, though, I can do without the photos of your food — mostly because it usually looks so tasty, and I’m usually skipping lunch.

A picture is worth, and has always been worth, a thousand words. But a thousand pictures might just be taking things a little too far.

For myself, I could either use the bathroom mirror to take selfies, or I could use that same time to clean the bathroom mirror. It’s a no-brainer: The bathroom mirror usually needs cleaning, and there already are far too many pictures of me.

Copyright 2014 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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